


Dear Jim

by Elah



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Insanity, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 11:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/418151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elah/pseuds/Elah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Dear Jim: I don't need to be fixed. In lieu of flowers, please send regards to the dumps and rivers where bloated bodies melt away. Best wishes, Jim." Character study on Moriarty's mental state.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear Jim

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a Tumblr post -- long lost now -- that essentially said, when you look at Moriarty's every action as a man ready to die at any second, he becomes an even more terrifying character. The story ended up deviating slightly to focus more on his potential mental state.
> 
> The fic spans the length of the first two seasons, including Reichenbach. Spoilers.

You who knows so much, the knowledge clouds your brain and like a shutter you are shut out from seeing the truths of us.

\-----

_The day before the first panic attack, the hours stretched like infinite rubber strings. The minutes just kept pulling as though they were trying to impede him from reaching the next: a warning system that he had no knowledge of and therefore could not heed. He remembered picking up on the slowness of the day, an idle noticing that flickered through his brain like an electrical current immediately dispensed when there were no connections and no associations to be made with it._

There was a scar on his knee, round, dull, pink-white. He slid his pants over it, made it disappear. Magic.

_The slow day had been a Tuesday completely usual in every way. High school had always been disgusting for him, for Jim. The mindless either occupied desks or taught inconsequentialities. The brilliant were outcast because they were also the oddballs. Little did the mindless realize that to be brilliant and mindful, one had to be off-kilter, off-center, it was a requirement of the --_

He always brushed his teeth as though he were catching prey. Harsh, uncompromising. No wonder his teeth had filed to points.

_That Wednesday shook him apart. “It killed me,” he would croon to a boy years later. The boy had been half-destroyed by an operative’s idiocy, a bomb gone wrong, a silly mistake. Blood became the boy, set off his tan skin, brought out the green in his eyes as his breath crackled and popped through his flattened windpipe. Jim had had the warehouse vacated of operatives to leave he and the boy to chat. He squatted, tailored pants stretching slightly, propping his elbows on his knees, leaving his face squished between his hands. “I hate Wednesdays now, don’t you? The week half gone and half not. Ooh, it just leaves too much for the mind to digest and plan.”_

To tie his tie, he was forced to watch himself in the mirror. He always tilted his head as he did it. The skewed perspective made so much more sense.

_Blood vomit spewed, just out of the reach of Jim’s shoes. The man stared at the puddle as it _slid_. “I’ve been dead so long, boyo. I haven’t a clue what dying feels like anymore. Or living, is this living now?” He left his head in one hand as the other flicked blood flecks off the hem of his pants. “I live to watch people die. Such a _ game _.” Something was pulsing between the boy and the floor, trapped behind the tattered shirt. He wanted to press the pulsing thing back into the boy with the squelch it would undoubtedly make. “All because some old fool played a video.”_

He always turned away from the mirror before he grinned because to smile at himself, no, that wouldn’t do. He knew that it was the world that should take notice when his lips twisted.

_Twenty years ago the screen had showed horrors. Audio files screeched out deformed sounds behind a deceptively calm narration. This, there, was where he learned how to create layers of one’s self. He set his head down on the desk, stared unfocused at the plastic, and experienced doom._

“Good morning,” he would greet his door before strangling the knob. “Are you ready for me today?”

\-----

I am not who you perceive me to be. I am inside myself, beating the organs with invisible and intangible weapons, clawing at my arteries and ripping away at my bones. I am eating myself alive and you haven’t the power to see it happen. Dear diary.

\-----

_Sometimes he enjoyed the colors. Splotches of scarlet on the carpet. It was like a song. Blue eyes speckled with realism. A song without sense. The best kind of music._

He was never quite all there. But then, he never needed to be.

_There had been so much blue in the pool. The still water, chlorinated, bleached of sickness. The virgin and the soldier both had shockingly blue eyes, shocking, shocking like electricity. He’d considered having the three of them shot, all falling into the pool -- blood in water made for such a pretty crime scene._

He needed no mansion and instead signed a lease in the most disgusting sham of an apartment he could find in the city. The moulding in the hallways were growing mold in their cracks, an insidious infestation. It was _gorgeous_.

_The gun had been silver and unimportant. Silver was boring. Red, now red was interesting, the way it made resignation smack over their faces. Just a spot of red, a stab of the paintbrush, and the whole portrait of bravado was unraveled._

\-----

I am volatile even before being mixed with others and then I am explosive. My nails dig into skin and the marks disappear before they can be noticed. Dear diary.

\-----

_Caught intentionally, he’d had so much_ fun _that he continued to enjoy the replays, wetting his lips each time they pressed rewind. If he could unwind and return to the past -- well, he would refuse the power. He had died in the past and now lived for every second of the future he could never have forever._

Elevators were boring. He waited until he got to the ground floor, and then pressed all twenty buttons so he could soak in the boredom again. No one joined him and no one left. Button seventeen was split and chipped, the orange light sickened to a sunny yellow.

_He refused to blink when they hit him, swiveling his head back around to stare them down. Confrontation with their own ineptitude was such a bitch._

The lobby was pathetic. He sat down on the carpet for five minutes and grinned at the chandelier. “Hello, pretty. You shine so _bright_. I rather hate you.”

_The time alone was maddening. He hadn’t anyone to play with. He was tired of being in his own head, it was so much more fun to worm his way into others’. There was an out, though, his savior. He scrawled that name into the walls, the one-way mirror, kissed the O when he was done, grinned at the iceman behind the glass. And sat back down for the next beating._

Laughter tickled his stomach until it went erupting past his tongue. He exited the building giggling, head thrown back, cackling at the sky.

\-----

My body doesn’t dance like my soul likes to spin. There is more than one type of confinement. Oh, I am on the brink of nonsense and enlightenment. You, my dear, do not know what you have slid across the surface of like a serpent, a sidewinder, a slick and sniveling son of a bitch. Dear diary.

\-----

_Their home was too easy to find, to burrow into. Of course, his residence was much too easy to find, as well -- home of Richard Brook, the actor, the smiler, the innocent -- but they never quite found enough down time to visit. Pity. He left a gift hidden away like an egg from a bunny. Hippety hop, boys, get down to it._

He walked. He’d driven once or twice but it left him with far too much to care about -- lights that flashed the Bolivian flag, signs that promised people and then were made liars by the empty streets -- nothing was _just so_.

_He adored the color of the throne though it was not his. His throne was the world and he was bored with it. What would happen, he supposed as he waited, if he allowed just one itsy bitsy warhead to slip off a plane? Would even chaos seem dull?_

As he meandered towards the hospital he could feel the gun press against his rib cage like a misshapen xylophone. His nonsensical song. His death march. Oh, it was beautiful. Might make Mozart weep.

_The trial was a herd of cavalry on wooden horses, rushing at him with squeaky wheels and their secrets and weaknesses painted on the sides of their steeds. It took two phone calls, one from him, one passed on through that, to set them all ablaze. Then, to war. Debts must always been repaid. An apple that day would keep the doctor away. Or did he mean the iceman?_

Living with insanity was just like living sane. There were simply different rules.

_He enjoyed playing the innocent, the beguiled, sitting in a cardigan as the stage was slowly fit together. The couple sat in the dark for so long, he could have pissed himself fourteen times over and still had time for a shower. But he exerted his small amount of self-control, waited until the cat dragged in her ass and then he followed after. They all put on a fantastic show, leads and supporting alike. Bravo, the empty audience cheers. He must forego the encore to gain a little time, to get home and change into his Sunday best. As he does, an imperfection catches his attention. There was a scar on his knee, round, dull, pink-white. He slides his pants over it, makes it disappear._ Magic.

He gets to the roof first. More waiting. He wants to spit on the seconds.

\-----

Every now and then, I fear myself. As I should. Dear diary. I shan’t miss you. You’ve never been all that nice.

\-----

When the virgin reveals his idiocy, his dullness and preoccupation with the mundane, the metaphorical edge arrives at his feet. He offers the true one to the other man, the small talk a formality, his vocal range blasting and squealing to off-put the virgin’s stoic monotone. The aggression is an orgasmic surprise.

“You’re insane,” he says with just a pinch of shock. A pinch, a tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket.

“...You’re just getting that now?”

He lays out the inescapable options, his web weaved into a noose. As his onetime equal stands ready to fall, Jim wonders if he should fall as well. There will be nothing of interest after this. He could leave a few last twists -- the fraud kills the actor and then himself, a North Korean sends off a bomb from China to Washington (with love), a homeless man on Edgware Road finds his fortune reversed. Then the virgin laughs. Finds the little boy with his finger stuck in the dam, threatens to remove the finger from the boy and let the city drown. Jim stares, astonished, into the shocking blue eyes of a man he thought he’d known entirely. _Hello, blue_ , he murmurs in his head, and then he sees the sickness.

Behind the stoic, beyond the virgin, is the palace of the perturbed. A man who must imagine himself a castle to keep his thoughts from overwhelming his mind, who must build a wire-topped wall between him and every acquaintance so that his emotions do not leave him too vulnerable to sly attacks of love. Sherlock sees every detail, every truth of the universe and they have each and every one broken him long ago. Jim wonders if this man must tilt his head to look at himself in the mirror, too, to make the world seem right with such an inundated viewpoint.

“You’re not ordinary. You’re me.”

Jim remembers the video, the teacher he burned long ago. The constant radio in his head, the lines from fairy tales, the streams of data and human motivations that he exploited with such little effort. The man staring at him with puzzlement, the insane man; he will never find another like this. This is finally a valid reason to go, to top the only other man in the world who could possibly understand. This is freedom for a purpose, not for boredom.

“You’re me! _Thank_ you.”

This is freedom.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

The last pages of the fairytales are blank and flip past to reveal the back cover. It is white and still.

“Thank you. _Bless_ you.”

No more strings to pull or be pulled by.

His last words uttered, Jim grins and splatters his diary with his very favorite color. He’d never intended for it to be read.


End file.
